


Serving Justice

by forgetcanon



Series: and love was their savior [3]
Category: Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic
Genre: Gen, Sunry Murder Trial, it's not revanasi yet but it's heading there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 23:27:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3465938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgetcanon/pseuds/forgetcanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Sunry murder trial, Vasha and Carth talk about doing the right thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Serving Justice

**Author's Note:**

> "Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph."  
> -Haile Selassie

The judges announced their verdict: Sunry was an innocent man. Mission wiggled in her seat like she wanted to cheer. Carth leaned back and smiled as the Sith prosecutor stormed up to the judges and began to argue in a low voice.

Carth expected Vasha to be beaming at the Sith's anger- nothing made her happier than outsmarting assholes, especially Sith assholes. Or perhaps she would be congratulating Sunry and Elora.

Instead, she coldly packed the small bag with her legal notes. Elora came to her, crying in gratitude, and Vasha acknowledged her with only a few short, sharp sentences. Elora looked like she'd been slapped.

With that, Vasha left the courthouse.

"What was that about?" Mission whispered.

Carth frowned. "I have no idea."

Jolee came forward to speak to Elora and Sunry. Carth stood.

"I'm heading back to the ship," Carth said. “You sticking with Jolee?"

* * *

 

Vasha should have been ecstatic. When a plan worked flawlessly, she bragged and flaunted and settled in to annoy the hell out of anyone who'd doubted her. It didn't befit a Jedi, as Bastila often said, but Vasha said that she deserved to be proud of herself when things went right.

Instead, Carth saw a pair of legs sticking out over the edge of the Ebon Hawk, swinging gently. Vasha had found the time to change out of her Jedi robes and into the thin clothes she wore under her armor, but then she'd climbed on top of the Ebon Hawk. She was brooding.

So something had gone very wrong. What had he missed? Sunry was _free_.

"You alright up there?" he called.

"Peachy keen," Vasha called back.

"Want company?"

Vasha's legs stilled. "I'm starving. Haven't eaten since before the trial. Find something good, would you?"

"I'm not your nanny, come down and pick something yourself."

“Nah.” Vasha’s legs resumed their lazy swing. "You want an explanation, you bring me food. That's my price."

Carth muttered, "So she's in one of _those_ moods." He heated up the remains of last night's fish soup (everything they'd eaten since they came to Manaan involved _fish_ ) and stuck two spoons in his pocket.

Vasha came and stared down the ladder as he climbed up. "Hey, don't break your neck, make two trips."

"I've climbed ladders while being shot at," Carth retorted. "I can manage two bowls. Here, grab yours."

She reached down and grabbed one bowl from him, then the other. When he pulled himself up, she’d moseyed up towards the cockpit, rather than where she’d been laying before. She handed over his bowl in exchange for a spoon, rubbed it on her pants doubtfully, and dug in. 

Vasha looked plenty happy to eat her soup and stare at the far wall of the hangar. Carth did her the favor of letting her get at least a third of the bowl down before he started things.

"You didn't look too thrilled, back there in the courthouse."

Other than anxiously tapping her spoon against her knee between bites, Vasha was doing an excellent impersonation of a stone wall. "What did you think of the outcome?"

Carth knew better than to lie. "Sunry's a hero. It's good he got off, after the Sith tried so hard to frame him."

"That's the thing," Vasha said, and put a spoonful into her mouth instead of continuing.

Carth frowned. "What's the thing?"

Vasha shrugged. "It's not important. The war hero got off, the Republic looks good while the Sith look conniving, everyone goes home happy."

He hadn't faced such bitter sarcasm from the tiny woman since Kashyyk. "You've lost me. Why aren't you glad about that?"

Vasha looked at Carth, mouth drawn and dark eyes hard. “It’s a good story. Except I heard the truth from the horse's mouth himself. Hell, I even saw it. The Republic had a recording of it in their embassy computers. Sunry killed Elassa while she slept."

Carth frowned. "Wait, so she _was_ a Sith."

"She was _asleep_ , Carth," Vasha said, clenching her spoon in her fist. "I don't give a damn about Sunry being a Republic War hero or Elassa being a Sith spy. At the end of the day he gets to cheat on his wife and shoot his lover and he walks away."

She huffed angrily, turning her face away. "And I let him. In fact, I worked _hard_ to make sure there was no doubt. The hotel clerk? The one who testified that Sunry left after the shot? I bribed him. 200 credits, and a murderer walks free."

The fist clenched around the spoon was shaking. Her hand twitched like she wanted to throw it. He wouldn’t blame her.

"What is a woman's life worth, Carth?" she asked quietly. "I just let a man walk for killing a woman while she slept. And if I was forced to relive today, I'd do it again."

"Why?" Carth asked. 

"Kolto restrictions!" Vasha spat the word so venemously that Carth had to replay her words. "The price of medpacks is already too damn high. Sunry walks free so soldiers I will never see don't bleed out on their battlefields!"

Carth didn't know how to react to that. What was he supposed to do, tell her that she was a hero? He _was_ grateful that she'd done it. He'd been on too many battlefields himself when the medpacks got low and the medics started judging who lived and who died.

But she'd knowingly defended a murderer. 

“Damn it," he muttered. 

It surprised a smile out of Vasha, though she still inspected the far wall of the hangar rather than look him in the eye. "Right. My thoughts exactly. Truth be told, I don't think Jolee is much happier about it than I am. At least Elora gets her husband back from all of this, for what her husband is worth.” 

Carth shook his head, slowly putting together his thoughts. "I… I don't know what I would have done, in your position."

Vasha shook her head, smiling wryly at him. "I know what you would have done, Carth. You would have slapped the proof in front of the judges, gone home that night, and not missed a wink of sleep."

Carth gave her a look. "You seem awfully sure about that."

"Hey, I've had a few months to get to know you. You can be an asshole sometimes, but you're--" She waved her spoon, blushing slightly. "You're honorable, I guess."

"You 'guess,'" Carth quoted sarcastically, ignoring her blush and the way she stumbled over the compliment. He'd revisit that, later.

"I guess," Vasha confirmed. "You _probably_ wouldn't have thought of bribing the clerk."

Carth chuckled. "200 credits? I'd use 50, max. I'm not made of money."

Vasha chuckled, always up for a bit of black humor, so he continued.

"Neither are you, even with your dueling money and swoop racing. I'm surprised you didn't just…" He gestured with his spoon-hand, mimicking the persuade motion he'd seen Bastila use once or twice.

Vasha's face soured. She stabbed at her food. "I guess I'm not that great a Jedi. Or that I _am_ a good one. I don't know which option is worse."

Carth frowned, figuring that was a statement on its own. Either a Jedi valued a single life, a single act of justice, over thousands of unknown lives, or they didn't. Either way, someone lost.

They lapsed into silence. Only their breathing and the occasional scrape of spoon on bowl broke it.

"I told you I was a smuggler," Vasha said suddenly, catching Carth in the middle of a bite. "Running blockades. I was working for a real scumbag for a while, this rodian with nasty teeth and a ton of scars. I ended up smuggling… some things I'm not proud of. Spice, mostly. Narcotics. Some weapons."

Vasha hesitated, bitterness written all over her face. "I kept telling myself as I was doing it that I wasn't the one using the weapons, distributing the drugs. If it wasn't me delivering it, then it would be someone else, so I might as well do what I was good at and get paid.

"When that stopped working for me, I snitched. I ran into the Republic's arms and spilled everything I knew in exchange for clemency. I got a job offer doing decent work, helping Bastila run Sith blockades and doing whatever needed to be done to end this damn war.

"Delivering drugs still doesn't make me feel as dirty as what I did in there today."

Carth shook his head, putting aside his bowl. "No, that's not right. You just saved thousands of lives today, and it doesn't sound like Sunry is going to be a repeat offender. That's not nearly on the same level as-- what you were doing before."

"I'm a Jedi, Carth," Vasha snapped, uncurling her legs and recurling them like she wanted to stand and pace. "A force for good, a balancer, someone that sticks up for the weak and ferrets out injustice. How am I supposed to be _that_ , and someone that is willing to turn a blind eye to a man who murders his lover, at the same time?"

Carth's neck itched, like something landed there and bit. "I... don't know. That sounds like a question for Bastila, or Master Zhar."

Vasha waved her hand dismissively. "I already know what Bastila's going to say."

"You seem pretty sure of what we're all going to do before we do it," Carth retorted.

Vasha set her jaw in annoyance. Her spoon scraped the side of her bowl. Eating gave her time to work up a clever line.

"You were put in a crappy situation," Carth said, forestalling whatever sass she would try to pass off as logic. "And you handled it the way you thought would work out best."

"Not for Elassa," Vasha said quietly.

"So you're going to mope about it?" Carth asked. "I'm surprised. Usually you're all full of plans to, I don't know, get Sunry shipped to the edge of the galaxy."

The spark didn't catch in Vasha's eye.

“Hey,” Carth said softly. “Have I ever lied to you?"

Vasha almost looked offended. “Only when you were being a cagey bastard."

Carth shrugged. “Fair enough. Just- You did what you could, today. You took a bad situation, and made the best one you could out of it. Do you believe me?"

Vasha met his eyes for a long, long moment. The corners of her eyes began to turn up. “I bet you tell that to all the pretty girls."

“No,” Carth said, “I save speeches like that for the truly beautiful ones."

 _That_ got a smile. “Sweet talker."

By the rest of the crew got back from their free day on Manaan, the cloud had passed.

* * *

 

Carth knew Jolee and Vasha talked it over late that night, commiserating over how damn complicated the galaxy could make things with a bottle of Selkath liquor. He caught Bastila looking strained as she read over a well-used datapad that housed her personal store of Jedi teachings. Most troubling of all was when Mission sat with him in the cockpit as they travelled to Tatooine and quietly asked what he _actually_ thought of the verdict. 

Justice hadn’t been done. They knew it. They’d have to live with it.

Next time, they’d do better.

**Author's Note:**

> I hate the Sunry murder trial. The dude murdered his girlfriend! While she was asleep! Context or not, that's not the kind of thing we should be getting Light Side points for covering up. Ugh.


End file.
